Wilkes Street (between South Royal and South Lee)

The Wilkes Street Tunnel is a short brick-arched railroad tunnel cut beneath Wilkes Street in the early 1850s, between the surface streets of South Royal and South Lee. It allowed the Orange & Alexandria Railroad — chartered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1848 — to traverse the rise Wilkes Street follows on a north-south alignment without disrupting the east-west colonial street grid above. From the tunnel’s southern portal the line descended to the Alexandria wharves on the Potomac; from its northern portal the line ran up to the inland trunk that eventually reached Gordonsville and Lynchburg.

Civil War — the U.S. Military Railroad

The O&A line was one of the most strategically important pieces of antebellum infrastructure to fall into Federal hands when Union forces occupied Alexandria on May 24, 1861. From occupation forward, the tunnel and the line it served were operated by the U.S. Military Railroad (USMRR), the wartime federal agency that ran the captured southern rail lines as a Union supply network. Through the tunnel, freight moved between inland depots and the Alexandria wharves where it was transferred to and from coastal steamers; the small brick portal was a daily sight of the city’s wartime supply economy. The USMRR vacated the line at the war’s end in 1865 and returned it to its corporate successor.

Postwar and decommissioning

The line passed through a series of postwar corporate successors — the Virginia Midland Railway, Southern Railway, and ultimately Norfolk Southern — and the tunnel continued to carry freight to the waterfront wharves for roughly a century after the war. As Alexandria’s waterfront industrial use declined through the mid-twentieth century, traffic through the tunnel slowed and eventually ended. The rails were lifted, the cut was paved, and the tunnel was repurposed as a public pedestrian and bicycle passage.

The tunnel today

The tunnel today runs about a city block, with stone portals at each end and a brick-vault ceiling inside. The Alexandria Heritage Trail marker on the west side of South Union Street, on the approach path to the tunnel’s eastern portal, interprets the structure for walkers. The 501 South Union Street Place 501 South Union Street Six-acre city park at 501 South Union Street, occupying the south Old Town waterfront hill that gave its name first to a c. 1791 wind-driven grain mill and then to "Hayti" — the … sits a block north of the eastern portal and is the most common pedestrian connection.